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Will CS Students Switch From Microsoft?
spotter writes: "There's an article in Newsweek International that talks about how Microsoft's tactics are turning off an entire generation of CS students from their products and increasing the fortunes of Linux." The article isn't deep or flawless, but hits on a major point: what students learn in school is key to what they go on to do.
I see CS people as wanting to be with the next big thing, not the last big thing.
The next 'big thing' is a bunch of small, humble things that make 'big things' irrelevant: that is, the work being done by the Open Source community to fix the mistakes of the past. The next big thing... is software that actually works and meets needs. Find your niche and dig in. For those who majored in CS for the money rather than a love for the art and know only MS garbage, I really can't sympathize much. "Big Software Corp" is a dying beast. And that's a beautiful thing.
That said, I think you're blindly overlooking the fact that, at least in the United States (since he didn't say otherwise, I assume the MS support he called was in the States as well), we do have a choice of where we work. The decision to work under the employ of any entity can be as much a political one as anything else.
The person he talked to may not have been directly involved with Microsoft's licensing strategy, but s/he -is- a representative of Microsoft, and therefore should be, at least in some way, culpable.
AFAIK, the only way to run LISP or Scheme on the vast majority of computers is with an interpreter. If you recall your early days putzing around with BASIC on an Apple II or whatever, interpreted languages tend to be slow. Most serious software gets written in something that can be compiled...nowadays, that typically means C or C++. Even Java, which was intended to be an interpreted language, has some just-in-time compilers available for it that speed up execution a bit.
Then again, .net is supposed to be an interpreted environment as well...if Microsoft wants everybody to go down that path, you could very well see LISP.net or Scheme.net from somebody before long. (Intel must've brib^H^H^H^Hpersuaded Microsoft to come up with something to justify the continued need for faster and faster processors...they must be having a wet dream over .net.)
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.
That's very nice, but those are all distributed as self-extracting .exes.
I don't have a WinBloze system. Those are as useless to me as all those Outlook virii out there.
Is there any place to get a nice set of free fonts _for_Linux_?
Unless somebody has a way to unpack those with Linux?
Exceeding the recommended torque is not recommended.
Anyone reading the article would think that KDE isn't available yet--the authors evidently think that the upcoming version of KDE is the very first version, judging by the way they wrote it up.
It's well-known within the Empire that "Linux has no GUI". This is a consistent FUD assertion which Imperial minions are happy to propagate. I've seen several statements (the "UNIX on the desktop makes no sense" FUD, among others) which repeat that *NIX/Linux has no GUI, and requires the user to type inscrutable commands unto a shell prompt. I've also seen (several times) that "KDE, the Linux GUI, is due to be released xxxx". Nevermind that X is older than WinBloze, or that I had fvwm2rc95 in 1997 which looked exactly like Lose95, the Empire can't seem to publicize _that_.
Most M$ lusers were happy to lose the command prompt with DoS, and were always made queasy, if not simply terrified, by a big blank screen that said nothing but "C:>". Threatening them with a return to that is valuable FUD, from which the Empire will not part.
Exceeding the recommended torque is not recommended.